“When it’s twilight on the trail”
June 19, 2013
SLIM WHITMAN
I’ll wager that not many folks remember this lyric, but I’ll also wager that my son and daughters do:
Maggie dear won’t go out alone
Seems that she must have a chaperone
When we go out, no matter where we’re bound
There’s always someone around
She brings her father, her mother,
her sister and her brother
Oh, I never see Maggie alone
She brings her uncles, her cousins,
she’s got ’em by the dozens
I never see Maggie alone . . . .
That tune, with words by Harry Tilsley, was one of the songs I used to sing with or to my kids during our many car trips.
I learned that song from an album by Slim Whitman, who died today at the age of 90. I still have that album and others by Whitman among the hundreds of vinyl LPs we retain and occasionally play. I obtained those Whitman albums in the 1950s, when I was caught up with what then constituted country-and-western music. The collection also includes Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, Little Jimmy Dickens, Hank Snow, Bob Gibson, Hank Williams, Elton Britt, Wilf Carter (Luke the Drifter), and Tex Ritter.
I was listening to doo-wop at the same time, and I already was immersed in opera and other classical music, but that brand of country appealed to me. My friend Michael P. Moran and I even had a country music show for a few years on the radio station at Seton Hall University.
Whitman had a significant following that was partly due to his romantic style. While many country singers liked to dwell on the futility of life (“There Stands the Glass”), Whitman favored love songs and romanticism in general. His voice was also more likely to appeal to an audience beyond the usual country crowd; he was a genuine crooner. And he was a wonderful yodeler — he and Elton Britt were my favorites in that regard.
I lost interest in country music as it became more and more the highly-produced form that defines it now. But I still go back to the vinyl from time to time to hear it done right. Speaking of that, listen to Slim Whitman at THIS LINK.
Books: “The Art of Controversy”
June 18, 2013
NAST’S SANTA CLAUS
It’s one of the ironies of 19th century history that the same man who gave us the roly-poly image of Santa Claus that warms our hearts every year was also one of the most damaging political cartoonists of his era. But that’s the way it was with Thomas Nast, one of the artists Victor N. Navasky discusses in The Art of Controversy, a meditation on the art and implications of the caricature.
Nast famously set his sights on Tammany Hall, as the Democratic Party machine in New York City was known, and particularly on William M. “Boss” Tweed, a businessman and politician who dominated the affairs of the city largely through his control of patronage in the form of both contracts and jobs.
As Navasky relates, Nast’s work in Harper’s Weekly during the 1871 election campaign is credited with purging city government of the Tammany gang. Tweed and others in his circle were subsequently charged with enormous thefts of public funds and sentenced to prison. Tweed tried to flee, but a Spanish customs official arrested him after recognizing him from Nast’s caricatures.
VICTOR S. NAVASKY
Tweed was no stranger to criticism, but he famously remarked about Nast’s assaults on him: “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures!”
The story of Nast and Tweed illustrates many of the points made by Navasky, who is the former editor and publisher of The Nation and a former editor at The New York Times Magazine. One of those points is the power of caricature, which is a form of cartooning that emphasizes or exaggerates distinctive physical characteristics of the subject: Richard Nixon’s ski nose and widow’s peak, for example, or Lyndon Johnson’s ears.
“Characters and Caricatures” by William Hogarth
This is neither a technical analysis nor a history, although Navasky reaches back a few centuries in discussing the origins of caricature, noting that Leonardo da Vinci may have originated the form in the 16th century and William Hogarth was one of those who had perfected it in the 18th. This book is more a matter of Navasky thinking through the subject of political cartoons and not necessarily answering all of his own questions about the topic.
The author writes a lot about what makes caricature so effective. How effective? He points out one case in which an artist’s work landed him on Adolf Hitler’s “death list” and another case in which a cartoonist for Arab daily newspapers in Europe and the Near East was assassinated. In a far different vein, he devotes a chapter to the Nazi periodical Die Stürmer, which conducted a relentless campaign to ridicule and demean Jews, with caricature as a principal method. The editor, Julius Streicher, was hanged after the Nuremberg trials, and the cover cartoonist, Philipp Rupprecht, was sentenced to six years in prison, a sentence Navasky thinks was too light.
This potency raises in Navasky’s mind the question of whether political cartooning should enjoy exactly the free-speech protection that the written word has in the United States. He isn’t arguing that it shouldn’t, but he explores significant ways in which the two forms of expression are not identical — including the lasting (and frequently negative) impression a caricature makes and the fact that one can answer words with words (as in a letter to the editor), but can hardly make an effective response to a cartoon.
Navasky writes about editorial decisions (to publish or not to publish) such as the “Danish Muhammads” and a case of his own in which practically his whole staff opposed his choice to print a cartoon that portrayed Henry Kissinger “screwing the world.” This is a provocative book from Alfred A. Knopf about the use of caricature at various times in history and in various parts of the world. I screened editorial cartoons for my newspapers for the better part of four decades, but Navasky’s musings have given me new insights and raised questions that I had never considered.
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